Its whacking day

Jules Vernes, to borrow a joke, predicted the stately walnut paneled submarines we all travel in today. If his reputation were examined with scrutiny it would pale in comparison to the prescient powers of the collected wisdom of the Simpsons writers.

The florida everglades are wrought with Pythons. The proposed solution is whacking day.

There is a slideshow article about the proposal at the daily beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-26/the-giant-python-hunt/

Helping Haiti with Credit Card Points

One of the charities acting in Haiti i am familar with is Zamni Lasante ( Partners in Health ) founded by Paul Farmer. He came to speak at at VT.

http://www.pih.org/where/Haiti/Haiti.html

If you have capital one rewards you can use the site

https://www.capitalone.com/give/faq/

to donate to PIH as well as other charities.

Both cash and reward points can be redeemed.

Recent Wins

Number 1:

On a local trash night a few friends and I discovered a air hockey table. Realistically who needs an air hockey table so we didn't pick it up. One of my friends was wise enough to go back and grab the AC fan off of it. I took the fan, splice a dimmer switch in, attached onto a caterer's style coffee box and ran a piece of channel out the other side. The results is a pretty decent laptop cooling stand. With the voltage cranked down the fan is quiet buts its large enough to move a fair bit of air under the laptop. Placing a re-freezable ice pack in the coffee box help the fan cool my laptop cpu 10 degrees celsius in both normal uses and under load while compiling.

Number 2:

My Check Engine Light came on while I was driving out of town over the break. I pulled into an Autozone (or Advanced) and had them read the code. It was p0065 which on my Subaru correlates to a malfunction in the "Valve assembly-air assist injector solenoid". After some googling I decided I could fix it myself. It was easy to get at, held on by two bolts and from what I read probably only required cleaning.

I disconnected the battery ground, unplugged the electrical connector to the solenoid, unbolted it and wiggled it free from its hoses. Blowing through both hoses demonstrated they were unobstructed. Finally I shot the valve with some carburetor cleaning spray and a whole bunch of nasty black deposits came out.

I hooked all back up and started the car and the CEL was off. I thought I would have to have my oil change mechanic clear it next time i went in but the battery was disconnected long enough for the memory on the ECU to reset. So far the thing hasn't thrown a code so I think the cleaning did the trick.

What Happened to that Sweet Trend

I am Mixing Data Sources, I missed the spending totals as a monthly basis and am using the reported total for October from the recovery website in addition to the data sourced in my previous post.

Because I was missing data I assumed even spending between July and October. You can check out data for your self at www.recovery.gov or if you don't like the government recovery.org

If you find spending totals by month let me know.

We Have Death Panels

Who do you think works at insurance companies. The entire staff is part of a large bureaucracy. The goal of a health care company is to make money. Their revenue comes from their clients you and me. Their costs are paying all their employees including millions to CEOs, paying their stockholders, and paying out claims when people get sick. To pay stockholders and CEO's more they have to cut the only thing left: claim payments. The entire bureaucracy of an insurance company is driven to find ways not to pay claims.

The future of healthcare in America, according to Sarah Palin, might look something like this: A sick 17-year-old girl needs a liver transplant. Doctors find an available organ, and they're ready to operate, but the bureaucracy -- or as Palin would put it, the "death panel" -- steps in and says it won't pay for the surgery. Despite protests from the girl's family and her doctors, the heartless hacks hold their ground for a critical 10 days. Eventually, under massive public pressure, they relent -- but the patient dies before the operation can proceed.

It certainly sounds scary enough to make you want to go show up at a town hall meeting and yell about how misguided President Obama's healthcare reform plans are. Except that's not the future of healthcare -- it's the present. Long before anyone started talking about government "death panels" or warning that Obama would have the government ration care, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company's analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn't have saved her life.

That kind of utilitarian rationing, of course, is exactly what Palin and other opponents of the healthcare reform proposals pending before Congress say they want to protect the country from. "Such a system is downright evil," Palin wrote, in the same message posted on Facebook where she raised the "death panel" specter. "Health care by definition involves life and death decisions.

From

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/08/11/denial_of_care/

For those of you who cant read the caption in the video here is a transcript of that Nixon Tape:

This is a transcript of the 1971 conversation between President Richard Nixon and John D. Ehrlichman that led to the HMO act of 1973:

John D. Ehrlichman: “On the … on the health business …”

President Nixon: “Yeah.”

Ehrlichman: “… we have now narrowed down the vice president’s problems on this thing to one issue and that is whether we should include these health maintenance organizations like Edgar Kaiser’s Permanente thing. The vice president just cannot see it. We tried 15 ways from Friday to explain it to him and then help him to understand it. He finally says, ‘Well, I don’t think they’ll work, but if the President thinks it’s a good idea, I’ll support him a hundred percent.’”

President Nixon: “Well, what’s … what’s the judgment?”

Ehrlichman: “Well, everybody else’s judgment very strongly is that we go with it.”

President Nixon: “All right.”

Ehrlichman: “And, uh, uh, he’s the one holdout that we have in the whole office.”

President Nixon: “Say that I … I … I’d tell him I have doubts about it, but I think that it’s, uh, now let me ask you, now you give me your judgment. You know I’m not to keen on any of these damn medical programs.”

Ehrlichman: “This, uh, let me, let me tell you how I am …”

President Nixon: [Unclear.]

Ehrlichman: “This … this is a …”

President Nixon: “I don’t [unclear] …”

Ehrlichman: “… private enterprise one.”

President Nixon: “Well, that appeals to me.”

Ehrlichman: “Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. And the reason that he can … the reason he can do it … I had Edgar Kaiser come in … talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because …”

President Nixon: [Unclear.]

Ehrlichman: “… the less care they give them, the more money they make.”

President Nixon: “Fine.” [Unclear.]

Ehrlichman: [Unclear] “… and the incentives run the right way.”

President Nixon: “Not bad.”

[Source: University of Virginia Check - February 17, 1971, 5:26 pm - 5:53 pm, Oval Office Conversation 450-23. Look for: tape rmn_e450c.]

Kenyan Birth Certificates

So now you through the power of the internet can get the government of Kenya to certify your Birth Anywhere.

I did one for Phillip J. Fry of Futurama

Tim Noah Write SO I dont Have to

Please Please Please Read everything Tim Noah at Slate writes about the Healthcare System and its ongoing congressional slog.

A quote from his most recent article.

That, at any rate, is what Allan Brett sets forth in an essay posted July 29 on the New England Journal of Medicine's Web site. Brett makes the case that single-payer insurance (whose proponents, we now learn, include the president's former doctor) is not only superior to America's market-based system; it's also superior at serving the paramount value of that system, which Brett identifies as freedom of choice. He writes:

Incremental reforms preserving the private insurance industry and employer-based insurance would probably perpetuate the restricted choice of health care providers that many Americans already encounter: private plans typically limit access to certain physicians or hospitals, and physicians often refuse to accept certain plans. In contrast, single-payer proposals eliminate those restrictions.

This is quite true. Under a single-payer system, the government doesn't care which doctor or hospital you use because none is going to be more expensive than the others. Granted, the government may deny choice in tests and treatments, but Brett judges that reality as no more restrictive than with market-based medicine; the only difference is whether the gatekeeper is public or private

Go read it and his other articles:

http://www.slate.com/id/2223911/